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“Sometimes you’ll laugh/ sometimes you’ll cry/ life never tells us the whens or whys/ when you’ve got friends to wish you well/ you’ll find a point when you must exhale.”- Whitney Houston, Exhale, 1995

“Racial or ethnic differences in lung function exist. Specific reference equations…that have been developed from studies of certain populations are preferable when available. When such reference equations are not available, however, the use of correction factors is an appropriate interim solution. As an example, a correction factor of 0.88 may be applied to white subject reference values for FEV1…Assigning specific correction factors for racial/ethnic groups will become even more complicated in the future as racial/ethnic diversity increases.”– Official American Thoracic Society Technical Standards: Spirometry in the Occupational Setting (2014)

breathe out

During exhalation, the diaphragm relaxes from its previously expanded form, reducing the space in the chest cavity. As the diaphragm pushes against the lungs, carbon dioxide is forced upwards and out, exiting the body through the nose and mouth. If there is too much carbon dioxide in your body–if the process of exhalation is not enough to make up for the gases inhaled from, say, malfunctioning scuba diving gear or breathing into a paper bag–you could experience a host of consequences that range from vomiting to muscle spasms to death. If you don’t breathe out, your body will eventually stop functioning. Scientists say that adults take up to 30,000 breaths per day. Through constant movement, our lungs save us again and again from the edge of death.

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That is a good story, and some of it is true. But Whitney was a Black woman trying to love in this world, and so she knew, as she told us, that breathing is never as easy as it sounds.

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It is a good story, and some of it is true. But the guidelines for how to stay alive are very clear, and that’s where it starts to seem like fiction. In the movie Waiting to Exhale (1995) Robin says to Gloria, “I hope you find true love and get you some that’s so electric, you ain’t going to need no blow dryer.” In this movie, exhalation is about love, or all the things that get in its way. Filling the lungs with a home to wake up in on clear mornings, tender words in the back of Gloria’s salon, an electric love. A love that sets the air alive. Sometimes you spend a whole movie waiting, and it still isn’t clear what your lungs should be doing. Sometimes you burn your man’s car in your front yard and set the air alive yourself. Sometimes he leaves you for a white woman. Sometimes you spend a whole life asking your breath, am i safe here? It is a good story, and some of it is true.

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The babies in Beaumont, Texas know how hard it is to breathe. Or I am told they do. I am told they breathe in the rotten-egg smell of the sour crude that Exxon pumps onto their porches some nights, and I am told some of them grow up Black and alive. You can go online and hear this too, about Black people in Beaumont, Texas and Diamond, Louisiana and Oakland and the South Bronx and Bahia and Penuela. They will show you pictures of tired-looking Black rural folks and you will look into their eyes, the white reporters will show you washed out streets and back alleys, elders posed in the middle of the frame in broken chairs.

They will talk about how hard it is to breathe.

They will talk about how hard the breathing is.

They will talk about the time they couldn’t breathe.

If they did not exist in their broken chairs to breathe in the carcinogens and wear house-dresses in the New York Times, would lungs really exist. Black folks invented breathing I think. It makes sense. What I am trying to say is that we cannot breathe. What I am trying to say is that Black peoples’ lungs are never just lungs. What I’m trying to say is that our lungs are burdened with the weight of the world. We’re carrying you. Can you feel it?

If you think lungs are an organ, born in every human body, then you haven’t heard what I heard.

I heard lungs were made in the middle of a plantation

I heard lungs were made at the bottom of a mine where Black South Africans breathed in the dust that eventually coated their entire insides more than the air itself

I heard lungs were birthed from a white man’s medical notes

I heard they never wanted us to breathe, and so they made lungs, and learned how to measure how much we couldn’t breathe

I heard we may have breathed anyway, and so they were scared and created lungs

I heard lungs were born on the floor of the sea, when the sounds of Africans carried through the water and menaced the slaveship sailors in their dreams

I heard lungs aren’t real, not really

Have you heard this too?

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In Notes on the State of Virginia, written in 1784, Thomas Jefferson described a number of physical features which he believed belonged to African slaves. It was these features, he argued, that made the Black slave suited to a life of bondage. Among the features he listed were a greater tolerance of extreme heat, less need for sleep than whites, and “perhaps too a difference of structure in the pulmonary apparatus.” Jefferson went on to write that “A black, after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later, though knowing he must be out with the first dawn of the morning.”

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John Hutchinson was a British doctor who invented the spirometer–a machine to measure exhalation–in the 1840s, after realizing that the amount of air that could exit the lungs of a patient seemed to predict things like life expectancy. He wrote articles in which he advocated for the spirometer as a way of ensuring that policemen and soldiers were physically fit, ready to defend the nation or go searching for missing property without the hindrance of weak lungs. One must take in air in order to wear a uniform, it seemed, and the more air exhaled, the better. Hutchinson was also interested in using the spirometer as a tool to stop the spread of tuberculosis throughout the urban centers of the metropole. The spirometer could strengthen the police force, quarantine the poor, and prepare the army. It seemed uniquely suited for the challenges and terrors of nineteenth-century European life.

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Simone Browne reminds us that Black people were the first looked-at. Or that the hold of the ship, the boundaries of the plantation, the middle of the Atlantic, were the places where state surveillance and modes of measuring were born. On his plantation in Virginia in 1851, Samuel Cartwright conducted experiments on his slaves to measure what he believed to be inherent differences in lung capacity between Blacks and whites. Drawing upon both Jefferson’s and Hutchinson’s writings, Cartwright claimed to have found that “the deficiency in the negro was 20 per cent.” Like the countless scientists who followed and adapted his theories for their own uses, Cartwright did not adjust for differences in environment or living conditions. For Cartwright, the equation was simple: Black peoples’ lungs could expand to a lesser volume, and this physical pathology showed that the presence of the slavemaster and overseer was a necessary one. The deficiency in the negro was 20 percent. It could be measured in the lungs.

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I heard they never wanted us to breathe, and so they made lungs, and learned how to measure how much we couldn’t breathe

I heard we may have breathed anyway, and so they were scared and created lungs

Take, for instance, the government’s letter closing a case filed by the Black community of Ashurst Bar/Smith, Alabama, about the contaminated water, “respiratory problems,” and other harm caused by a state landfill.

“With respect to this issue, as investigated, the ECRCO finds that the record does not establish a prima facie case of discrimination…ECRCO finds insufficient evidence to conclude that ADEM violated Title VI and and EPA’s nondiscrimination regulation…EPA File No. 06R-03-R4 is closed as of the date of this letter.”

“insufficient evidence”

at what point does the work of gathering evidence cease to have meaning?

somewhere in “obvious,” somewhere within the necessities of seeing or thinking evidence is the human (eye and mind), human organs that can lead to reasoned decisions, and maybe that is where the trouble begins

In their suit, the residents listed a number of health and quality of life complaints stemming from the presence of the landfill in their community. These included

“impact from proximity to natural gas line;”

“increase in disease vectors;”

“drinking water well contamination concerns;”

In responding to this list and the allegation that the landfill company “intentionally discriminated against the African American residents of Ashurst Bar/Smith community during the public involvement process…”, the EPA does not deny that these adverse effects were there. They simply deny that they intentionally discriminated against the residents of the suit. They deny that they were required by law to inform residents of things like landfill overflow. How does one prove intention when the evidence is never enough? How does one breathe when no one is required to notify residents that the air is polluted with methane gas? It must be a mistake that every landfill in Alabama is sited in Black and poor communities, because the tools for measuring white peoples’ intention haven’t been created yet.

I heard they never wanted us to breathe, and so they made lungs, and learned how to measure how much we couldn’t breathe

I heard we may have breathed anyway, and so they were scared and created lungs

hold breath

breathe in

The difference was in the lungs. A holding breath, a withholding breath. In Thomas Jefferson’s words we can read the fear of a white man who couldn’t control his slaves. They would work all day and stay up into the night for themselves. They took the night for themselves, inhaled its cool air, made plans for rebellion or maybe just for tomorrow. A withholding breath. A breath held, kept close to the chest, a difference in the pulmonary function. A breath held with and among, a breath only for those you love, a breath held back so that those you love may live, a broken sob, a breathing with.

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Every time [REDACTED], remembering again how to breathe in smaller space, how to withhold, how to take in air while something else grasps at the ribcage like a smothering or a hug. [REDACTED] I can only hope that in this, my act of subterfuge, is some breathing left for me and you and us. There are different shapes for the air, some of them are smooth and snug. Less air is what you get sometimes when you change the shape of things, and that’s okay.

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I am interested in the subterfuge. I find it unspeakably funny that white scientists assume Black folks aren’t lying to them. You think you deserve the truth from my body, and for free? That is a laughing matter. I am interested in the breath withheld from the cold metal of the spirometer. I am interested in the breath held with and among the loved, the unledgered glares and resistant stiffness in the body, the air stolen and kept for a troubled day. The ones whose lungs weren’t measured because they looked too dangerous or sick, the ones whose eyes said contamination and toxic and i will kill you and so were left alone. The little bit of air kept at the end of a breath, to store under the tongue or between the thighs or tucked in the crease of an ear. To say, my body is already a lie, don’t worry. I would be lying even if I never tried.

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When Whitney Houston sang Waiting to Exhale in 1995, she had already grown up attending church and singing in a gospel choir, and I cannot ask her but perhaps she was already acquainted with the divine possibilities of what Black folks do with the lungs we were given. The quiet inhale of a prayer. The held breath of fear, the collective exhalation at the end of a service. Did you know we have always prayed in the outdoors. In the outer limits, in the woods, beyond. Did you know it is there that we have done our deepest breathing?

In Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, Ashon Crawley writes that, “To breathe within this western theological-philosophical epistemology, from within the zone of blackness, from within the zone of Blackpentecostalism, is to offer a critical performative intervention into the western juridical apparatus of violent control, repression, and yes, premature death. Thus, attending to the ways air, breath, and breathing are aestheticized are intentionally elaborating for one that would notice.” Crawley writes that the suppression of Black breath (Black life) (Black being,) (Black lungs!) has been a foundational part of the moral-political project that enshrined private property and practices of land holding within the rule of law. To be birthed within this project and to turn our attention, then, to Black people’s lungs in the service of prayer, praise, remembrance…

For Black feminist thinker, writer, and educator Alexis Pauline Gumbs, breathing is one way that we might fill ourselves with the living teachings of the ancestors. Gumbs’s Black Feminist Breathing Chorus website has guided audio meditations on affirmations based on quotes from Octavia Butler, Essex Hemphill, Anna Julia Cooper, Harriet Tubman, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Claudia Jones, June Jordan, Zora Neale Hurston, and others. Today, in a loud and cold place with my back against a window, I listened to Meditation #12: I Have Hopes for Myself (Gwendolyn Brooks). Gumbs’s voice led me through Brooks’s vision for cross-generational wondering, through what Gumbs called an “accessible affirmation,” an homage to potential. i have hopes for myself, i have HOPES for myself, I Have Hopes For Myself, I Have Hopes I Have Hopes for Myself, I Have Hopes for Myself, I Have Hopes for Myself, I Have Hopes for Myself, “and I have hopes for you.” In 2014, Gumbs led the Black Feminist Breathing Retreat, for “black-identified people who breathe or who want to breathe and who would cherish a space to breathe in the queer affirming, gender transforming, loving and abundant context of black feminist legacy and practice!” Scrolling through the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus website, my eyes lingered on the ornate collages of ancestors, their hair drawn out into paintstrokes and curlicues, held close with glitter and fabric prints and flowers. I stared into Essex Hemphill’s eyes, noting the brightness of the sunflower next to his smile. The air in my lungs began to sound like memory.

Thinking with Crawley and Gumbs about Black performances with breath and air as intervention and aesthetic, as ritual and quotidian practice, I also want to keep asking about the moments when breath was not given. Within the violence of all that keeps Black people’s lungs constricted, burdened with carcinogens and toxic waste, measured and harangued, instruments of a genocide continually in the making, to not only look for the breathing as answer, but for the breath saved for dreaming, the breath out of reach, the breath not breathed that speaks of impossible interiors, the never-possible things we have done with this thing called lungs, the ways we have hidden that could not have occurred, I will keep asking about the moments when breath was withheld, I will ask in the mornings and I will not write of it here, maybe you can ask in the mornings too.

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remembering also, with Gumbs, that meditation is not only about breathing but also about the chants that may give the breathing shape, also about its slowness, also perhaps, about its sometimes absence,

we might remember that to breathe, maybe, is to remake the world.

To find the beauty in what Black people do with air, to say Wait, in the relentless and ongoing cycling-through of our deaths,

To breathe, therefore, is to remember the world,

to reach back across yesterday and the days before, to offer praise and your forehead to the ancestors,

The hidden breaths that end the world,

To breathe, then, and to hold a small piece of that breathing for ourselves,

to not breathe, to keep some air where they will never find it, is a difference in the lungs.

it is a deficiency in the air we

breathe, to remember the sounds held in the

water,

to breathe, to exhale and to make lungs for the world to have

measured, to have cancer, have organs, to have the cold metal and the doctor’s notes that say